Friday, September 30, 2011

The school year has started! My kids are a bit crazy at times and I am feeling overwhelmed and trying to find my feet, but the knitting helps.

On the Needles
There has been a bit of a stall with the knitting lately simply because school has started. That being said, I have cast on for the Cladonia and getting a little bit of it done here and there and it is very good subway knitting. I am knitting the Cladonia in a light fingering, heavy laceweight yarn - Gherkin's Bucket MCN Cashmere in a custom colorway called Saucy.

I have seen a lot of Cladonias done both with the stripes and without and personally I prefer the solid color ones - for me they are more classic. Then again, it depends on what color combination is chosen - my friend Christy is also knitting one and she is using Jabberwocky from Fresh from the Cauldron which is a bright purple and red with black and gray. We were talking about what should be the contrast color and I was insisting that it had to be the black because the other 2 colors were so bright.

One thing that I found so far with the pattern is that I have alot of yarn and the shawl still seems pretty small; what I plan to do is double the stitches for the increases from 28 to 56, so that way it can be nice and big.

Working on the sleeves of the February Lady Sweater. After doing two repeats of the gull lace, I began to gradually decrease those extra 7 stitches that I cast on at the underarm to make the sleeves more fitted and less swingy. I am thinking of ripping out the bindoff of the body of the sweater and going back a bit because I think I knitted it a bit too long and it hangs right at the hip where I want it to be, but that is when it is unblocked. i really don't want it to get any longer so eventually be totally out of shape, so that will just take an hour or two to fix which isn't so bad.

What is very exciting about almost finishing the February Lady Sweater is that I finally was able to pick up my buttons from the post office. I ordered the English Script buttons from Howbeadyful on etsy, which are handmade fabric covered buttons. When I took them out of the package, they were WAY bigger than I had anticipated. I was concerned that they wouldn't fit through the button hole but they did! They are definitely "statement" buttons since they are a light color and pop against the dark blue of the sweater, but I like them.

I am planning my next sweater for once I also finish the Castle Pullover, which is where color cards came in.

I was planning on designing a cowl to submit to KnitScene, but unfortunately it didnt happen b/c i was so busy. I still have the idea in my head, but its on the mental shelf at the moment. I did get yarn for it from Quince and Co - I purchased Lark in twig and storm and also ordered the color card for the company. When I got the skeins, I knew I wanted to knit the sample of the cowl in twig, but wished it was really in chanterelle b/c its a wee bit lighter, and would show the cables more.

The colors were a bit off on my screen, but this is why i was really glad i got the color cards. I also ordered the color cards from Beaverslide Dry Goods - who I have had my eye on since I became a knitter bc Brooklyn Tweed was one of the first knitting blogs I read back when I was in Japan and he kept mentioning them alot "back in the day" around 2007.

I wanted to get the yarn for the melrose peacoat, but was having a hard time getting the right shade of green. I ordered the 3-ply McGill Meadows from Beaverslide, but when I received it, it was too bright of a green to go with the buttons. However, I ordered the color cards as well and thankfully, there was a shade of green just above it: Marsh Sedge. I never thought about it, but I put the button next to it and it WORKED.

Stashers Anonymous
The beaverslide dry goods yarn wasnt the only thing I purchased as of late. One the knitters in Ravelry posted a picture of Wollemeise Klappersnatch and Bluebell in one of the threads, and I just went gaga over Bluebell.

The other something was the Pick Your Poison club by Apothecary Yarns. Pick Your Poison is inspired by herbs that are poisonous and others as well - there are colorways called hemlock, wolfsbane, and ones called cyanide and strychnine. They are all on the superwash merino sock base, and you have great options: either one skein for $23 or two or more for $20.

In addition, you can buy the whole set of 9 colorways for $160. You can also mix and match and get things like 2 of one color, 1 of another, etc. In addition each "concoction" of 2 or more skeins comes with 3 stitch markers from Velvet H ippo. Signups end October 1, so if you are interested, check it out.

Shades of Green is a collection of various types of patterns utilizing various types of yarn weights ranging from sport to bulky. All of the patterns are knitted in a shade of green, hence the title of the book. There are various types of patterns spanning all different categories: shawls, sweaters, babies, socks, etc. There are patterns for cup and cellphone cozies and even for men as well.

The whole collection retails for $18 in PDF format and $20 in print (with a digital copy included). If you purchased the patterns individually (which you can do if you only like 1 or two of the patterns from Fiddle Knits or Ravelry) all together they would be $40.

However, if you want a chance at winning your own PDF copy of Shades of Green, leave a comment below on the blog stating which pattern would you want to knit. The deadline for posting your comment is October 9, 2011 at 10:00pm EST.

Now onto Wendy Knits Lace. What really caught my eye was the cover. More importantly, the shirt that the model was wearing - love it! And love how it works with the lace scarf. There is great styling done throughout the book and overall, it serves as a great reference and pattern book. It retails for $22.99 USD.

Events
After the first day of school, I was exhausted. Still, I went to the talk by Anna Hrachovec at Lion Brand Yarn Studio. Lots of fun and it was nice to see her again. Check out the slideshow of the pics here. I took tons of pictures of all the cute mochis at the event:

Knit the Queue Along: QAL
So finally am getting around to posting the guidelines and prizes for the QAL!

Guidelines:
1. There are two threads: the QAL Chat thread and the QAL FOs thread. The latter is no chat because your post number is the entry number for the RNG.

2. The project that you submit to the QAL FOs thread must have a queue date. This can be found on your project page on the lower right hand corner of the page, it will say, "Originally Queued: Date Goes Here." To be fair, since I haven't posted anything about the QAL on Ravelry and am doing it now and the idea of the QAL is to knit off the queue, not add more to it, there is a deadline for projects that can be added to the queue, while will be October 1. If you submit a project that has an "Originally Queued" date after October 1, it will not count for the QAL.

3. WIPs are not allowed. Again, the idea is to knit off the queue and generally speaking, if you click the "Cast On" button from the queue page, it will be a new project. Everyone who has posted an FO so far has a project start date after September 1, so that would be the cutoff date. If you did start something off the queue after September 1, you are fine.

4. You can submit as many FOs as you like (explain how someone suggested a system where people who knit sweaters can get more points but for the first go round, I want to keep it simple. However I would love to implement a chart/points system which is very teacher-ish, explain 25 book campaign and october sky for things like hats, sweaters, etc in terms of the effort and time put in).

5. The end date for QAL Round 1 (because I want to make this an ongoing QAL, but this will be the end date in terms of drawing for prizes) is December 31. Get your Christmas knitting off the queue too!

6. Have fun! The guidelines are meant to make it fair. This is the first round, so for now I want to keep it simple but I am open to suggestions and will make adaptations and such as necessary.

For a total of 6 prizes thus far. If I have spoken to someone about prizes specifically for this round of the QAL (as I would love to give out more prizes for Round 2 and so on) please contact me, or if you are interested in donating, let me know.

The Road to Rhinebeck

Knitting in Japanese

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